Heather Hart hovered over him, anxious and in shock, but, like him, she retained full possession of her senses. “I knew something was wrong,” she said rapidly as the staff men wheeled him into a room. “I didn’t wait for you in the skyfly; I came down after you.”

“You probably thought we were in bed together,” he said weakly.

“The doctor said,” Heather said, “that in another fifteen seconds you would have succumbed to the somatic violation, as he calls it. The entrance of that thing into you.”

“I got the thing,” he said. “But I didn’t get all the feeding tubes. It was too late.”

“I know,” Heather said. “The doctor told me. They’re planning surgery for as soon as possible; they may be able to do something if the tubes haven’t penetrated too far.”

“I was good in the crisis,” Jason grated; he shut his eyes and endured the pain. “But not quite good enough. Just not quite.” Opening his eyes, he saw that Heather was crying. “Is it that bad?” he asked her; reaching up he took hold of her hand. He felt the pressure of her love as she squeezed his fingers, and then there was nothing. Except the pain. But nothing else, no Heather, no hospital, no staff men, no light. And no sound. It was an eternal moment and it absorbed him completely.

2

Light filtered back, filling his closed eyes with a membrane of illuminated redness. He opened his eyes, lifted his head to look around him. To search out Heather or the doctor.

He lay alone in the room. No one else. A bureau with a cracked vanity mirror, ugly old light fixtures jutting from the grease-saturated walls. And from somewhere nearby the blare of a TV set:

He was not in a hospital.

And Heather was not with him; he experienced her absence, the total emptiness of everything, because of her.